12
PARTISAN REVIEW
no such swift and radical adjustment to the Stalinist program was possible.
The available literary tradition in Britain was aristocratic; it was, moreover,
still comparatively vigorous. And the young English poets glanced back to·
wards that tradition quite as often as they looked ahead towards any other.
A comparison of Stephen Spender's
The Destructive Element
with
Granville Hicks'
The Great Tradition
will reveal the crux of the difference
between the two Lefts. Both Hicks and Spender torture the literary past
in order to compel it to yield the justification for a contemporary literature
of politics and class struggle. But Hicks leaves the past in ruins and the
Communist Party in solitary possession of the present. Spender on the other
hand is enormously respectful towards the older writers; and after, as it
were, extorting from them the admission that they were individualists, he
turns the weapon of individual integrity-their weapon--on the Commu·
nists. Spender is, of course, a sensitive and valuable critic; and his superiority
over Granville Hicks is a measure of the greater literacy of the English
movement.
Yet the writers whom Spender so respectfully salutes as "ancestors"
were not in most cases English. Henry James and T. S. Eliot were Amer·
icans; Joyce and Yeats were Irish. England had produced in the 20's several
modern personalities (D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis) but no organized
modernist movement; and the Auden circle has had the task of realizing
such a movement in the 30's. In architecture, the theater, and the plastic
arts England had likewise missed the boat; and only in the present decade
have abstract and surrealist painting, a functional architecture and an ex·
pressionist theater J:>egun to appear in force on the English scene. The
poetry of the Auden circle is thus but one feature of a tardy cultural awaken·
ing which extends to several fields.
England's belated modernism came to birth, however, under conditions
which have curiously modified both its character and its mission. Not a
boom, but a depression, had prepared its coming. For a century English
society had permitted no really rebellious esthetic movement to cling for
long to its monolithic crags; but, shaken a little by the Depression, it devel·
oped rifts in which a modern culture might take precarious root. And this
culture could hardly fail to take note of its environment, could not but
draw conclusions, political and economic, from the conditions which alone
had made it possible. So the esthetic program of the New Poetry was re–
inforced by a messianic purpose unknown to such movements in the past;
and the heritage of symbolism, surrealism and expressionism was expended
on a literature of propaganda. In W. H . Auden virtuosity unites with
didacticism.
With its miscellany of styles and ideas, its shifting points of view and
its incredible contradictions, the world of the New Poetry seems a veritable
fantasia of modern art and ideology. It has had many jobs to do, and
often
